Where to find classy Halloween indie Internet radio

This Halloween all the big streaming music services will, as usual, cook up perfectly decent curated channels. But here are various indie online sources that will offer something better than the norm.

Classical station WQXR in New York’s Q2 “living composers” channel will be running their second Halloween scarathon with 20th century content that will definitely give you the hairy eyeball. Remember all that extra-creepy music from György Ligeti, Béla Bartók and Krzysztof Penderecki in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining? That’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about for this year’s festivities. ‘QXR staff are even soliciting suggestions and I know that regular Q2 denizens will have good ones. I suggest you tune in. I definitely will.

If you need something a little stronger for Halloween, Soma.fm’s Doomed channel is without any question the most all out terrifying music stream I know. It bills itself as “Dark industrial/ambient music for tortured souls” and I gotta tell you, that’s pretty much what it is. Selections include tunes from Ah Cama Sotz’s Dead Cities album, Throbbing Gristle’s song “Beachy Head,” and Agonoise’s “Under the Cross.” This is “abandon-all-hope-all-ye-who-enter here” music at its best. Cultivate your existential crisis this Halloween at Soma.fm.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a more soothing/inspiring dungeons-and-dragons, Harry Potter, sword-and-sorcery soundtrack kind of Halloween, 8tracks.com has lots of really nice playlists waiting for you. I recommend three particularly elegant ones: Words Are Wind, a playlist dedicated to epic adventure soundtracks, Audio Aderall, the closest thing I can imagine to a Halloween study music playlist, and Artistic Thoughts, a weird-but-in-a-nice way ambient music stream.

Finally, you never know what those scamps over at ARTxFM in Louisville, Kentucky are going to do, music-wise. But last Halloween they ran an intergalatic rave during the town’s Halloween Parade, and their Twitter feed indicates that various deejays have already done Halloween shows. So I’ll be checking them out as well.

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About Matthew Lasar

Matthew Lasar is a co-founder of Radio Survivor and its business manager. He is the author of Radio 2.0: Uploading the First Broadcast Medium (http://tinyurl.com/jr8uknk) and teaches history at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Likes: deejays, classical music, Disco, postpunk, cats, free school lunches. Dislikes: money, ideologies, claims that technology will fix everything. Follow him on twitter at @matthewlasar.